Novels by Victoria Writer

Nathaniel looked at her."You do not need to exhaust yourself over this," she said. "I will go to the hospital myself. I will handle it directly."Before she could finish the thought, Marcus's voice came back through the phone, quicker than before, a slight shift in its texture that was almost imperceptible but not quite."There is no need for that, Penelope," he said.But Nathaniel was no longer listening to his son's objections.He had pressed the phone more firmly against his ear, and something in his posture had changed, something in the set of his shoulders that suggested the conversation had just delivered something unexpected."I was not sitting idle before you called," Marcus continued, his voice regaining its composure. "I have been pushing on this from my end. The lawyers I contacted before this call gave me a response just shortly before you rang, actually a reasonable one. I am working on getting the full footage released through the proper legal channels, and I have been

Penelope looked up from the screen the moment the phone began ringing, and something in her expression shifted, sharpened, the way a person looks when they have been waiting for a specific piece of information and the waiting is finally over."It is him," she said, almost to herself, already bringing the phone to her ear. "The person I sent the footage to."Nathaniel straightened in his chair, his full attention swinging toward his daughter, reading her face for information before a single word had been spoken.Penelope accepted the call."Tell me what you found," she said, skipping the pleasantries entirely, her voice clean and direct.The voice on the other end matched her energy without hesitation."I have gone through everything you sent me," he said, his tone carrying the particular confidence of someone who has done this enough times to be completely certain of their conclusions. "I have analyzed it thoroughly, frame by frame, metadata included, and here is what I can tell you."

Penelope reached across and placed her hand briefly over her father's, the gesture quiet and deliberate, the kind of touch that is meant to slow someone down rather than comfort them."You need to calm down," she said, her voice steady and measured, carrying the particular authority of someone who is genuinely less frightened than the person they are speaking to. "It has not gotten to that point yet. Not yet. And I genuinely believe that before this day is fully over, we are going to have information, real information, that moves this situation forward." She held his gaze. "Liam is going to be fine. I am sure of it. You have nothing to worry about on that front."Nathaniel looked at her for a moment, something shifting in his expression between gratitude for her composure and frustration that she seemed to possess a certainty he could not locate in himself."Then what is making you angry?" he asked. "Because I can see it. You are not just worried. You are pissed. You are disgusted abo

Nathaniel nodded slowly."So what," he said, his voice dropping into something harder, "are they holding him with?"The question sat in the air between them."Nothing that this footage supports," Penelope said. "Nothing at all." She shook her head slowly. "If you show this footage to any reasonable person, any person who is willing to look at it without a predetermined conclusion already in place, they are going to ask the same question we are asking. The doctor was alive when everyone left that room. So where does Liam's culpability begin? On what basis did they put handcuffs on him in front of an entire room of people?" Her voice tightened slightly despite her effort to keep it even. "Unless the answer is simply that he is an E-level citizen who laid his hands on someone in that room, and certain people decided that was enough of a reason to build a case around him."Nathaniel's jaw tightened."That is exactly what I think happened," he said, and the words came out with the particul

The silence that followed his departure was different from the silence that had existed before he entered. It was lighter somehow, and at the same time more intimate, the specific quality of a room that has contracted to hold only two people who know each other in ways that cannot be fully explained to anyone else.David looked at Emily.For a moment he said nothing, simply watching her with the careful attention of someone who has learned to read a person not from what they say but from the small, unguarded spaces between their words."Things are moving," he said finally, his voice low and easy. "Smoothly. Better than I expected, honestly." He moved slightly closer, his tone shifting into something that existed just between the two of them. "And once this is finished, once we close out this narrative and win this case and take back the company and everything that belongs to this family, we go straight to the original plan." He held her gaze. "You know that, right? Everything we discu

He paused, making sure he had their full attention."What if we push the narrative that Leon was the mastermind behind the mining site collapse?"The room went very quiet.David continued, his voice steady and building in conviction."Think about it. He has not been officially dismissed from his position yet. That is a fact. Which means that on paper, on record, his responsibilities at that site were still active on the day it collapsed. Now, what if we push the story that he had been systematically stealing equipment from the site for months? Quietly. Incrementally. The kind of theft that is designed not to be noticed immediately, pulling pieces here and there, selling them, replacing critical components with inferior substitutes, and that by the time that day arrived, the structural integrity of that entire operation had been compromised by his theft, by his negligence, by his deliberate decision to prioritize his own gain over the safety of every single person working there?" He st